I would ignore the disgruntled employees posts. Analysts have by now had plenty of opportunity to ask management about this and the concensus is that it is not a problem. My own enquiries have turned up that IDT did have some start-up problems that have been addressed. They have pulled their most experienced fab manager up from California, have hired several new people and have changed the way they are training and running the fab. While the Oregon fab will be continuing to ramp up for at least the next several quarters as volumes for the C6 and other parts grows, (perhaps exponentially), and some problems in the ramps are almost certain to occur, this can't be considered a "show stopper" like it has been for AMD. The word I get from IDTI management and employees and from outside sources is that things are back on tract and that yields are excellent for this stage of the ramp. Brian said last week that yields on the first production runs of the C6 at the Oregon facility are running over 50% at the wafer probe stage. Overal yields, packaged and tested, are lower but acceptable. A doable target for wafer probe yields for the C6 is about 70% and maybe 60% for finished, tested parts. If I remember correctly, the current run rate capacity of the Oregon fab is around 11,000 8" wafers/month which they hope to ramp to around 30,000 over the next several months (anyone with notes from the last conference call, please correct me if I missed). I haven't calculated what the number of die/wafer should be, but I think at 88 sq it will be substantial. IDT has ramped to production of 10s of thousands of C6 parts/month out of the CA fab and expects to ramp to at least 100 thousand parts/mn by the end of the current quarter as they ramp up the transition to Oregon. The C6 is being run in both 0.35 and 0.25 process technologies: if 0.25 is able to be ramped successfully it will probably win out over the 0.35 process.
The only question I am interested in is how many parts are being produced and sold. Whatever problems they had in the Oregon facility were made a top priority and have largely been cleared up. Employee morale is said to be high according to IDT's personel department, IDT management and outside recruiters. "Show me the money!" should be what we want to see, not what some disgruntled employee thinks. |
